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The Eve programming language project is winding down

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Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#71

Post by falcor84 »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #26
chubot wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious what's the general space that Eve is in? Programming environments for non-programmers? I applaud the ambitious efforts of both Eve and Light Table -- it's definitely worth trying, and the negative result is valuable too. But part of me wonders if they were tackling too big a problem, or at least MARKETING a (potential) solution to too big a problem. IIRC, I believe they figured out through talking to use…

> . How many people in the world have the IQ to write a program of say 100 lines that does something useful? Have the IQ necessary? Probably 90-95%. Have the training? Significantly lower. The training required consists of both being taught a language/medium to express thought it, and being taught a structured cause and event method of thinking. There's this incredibly pervasive view in a lot of areas that programmin…

Even assuming that programming is no harder than writing (which I highly doubt), I'm doubtful that 90% of people can write 100 lines of effective prose, even after 16 years of schooling. For what it's worth, I'm not quite sure I could.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#72

Post by paulhodge »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #41

While Eve is an interesting problem, the main issues that makes programming hard are the same thing that makes law hard: 1) Specifying something in an unambiguous way. 2) Knowing what assumptions you are making. 3) Anticipating contingencies. Read a contract or the tax code. Even though they are using English (in the US), it requires an advanced degree to be able to craft such legal documents well. It is the same thi…

Yeah, people talk about necessary complexity vs unnecessary complexity.

"Unnecessary complexity" is all those arcane coding rituals that we do, that our users don't know or care about, but we have to do because our current tools demand it.

We can't get rid of necessary complexity and so we probably can't design a programming interface for someone that is completely illiterate in math & logic.

But what we can do is 1) Eliminate unnecessary complexity, and 2) Provide helpful, structured, interactive, learnable tools, which help guide the author as they do all the "necessary" steps. If we just did that then that would be a huge improvement from the state of the art.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#73

Post by tenken »

rntz wrote: post #55
golemotron wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if programming is just hard?

Building bridges is hard. But it's a lot easier now than it was five hundred years ago. There's no general reason to think hard things can't get easier.

Sure there is, that's why mastering a concept is hard and takes thousands of repatitions or hours to become masterful.

Similarly not simply building the same old bridge, because who the hell wants bridge 1.0 I want warp-bridge 20.0 now, requires I have a mastery of basic Bridges and additional pioneering topics currently of interest of which few individuals are experts.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#74

Post by erikpukinskis »

azhenley wrote: post #58
ibdknox wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but it's pretty easy to make judgements from the sideline about what people should or shouldn't do. I was the PM on Visual Studio. I can assure the things I showed in Light Table weren't there. Nor were they in Eclipse, as I studied that as well. You can pick and choose any number of things from our work over the years and say "Hey, but this looks like that" - I'm sure it does, but the question is does it wo…

Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes." My experimental code editor design, Patchworks [1], is one such example. P.S. I'm a big fan of your work! Looking forward to hearing about your next project. [1] http://dl.acm.org/authorize?N84177

> Graduate school is a great place for "people testing the fringes."

Testing, yes, but not exploring. Grad school gives you one experiment and then you have to start publishing. So if you have something you want to try out, with a direct implementation strategy and a clear set of possible outcomes, then you can do that at grad school.

If you want to try many things and iterate, grad school will not work well. You will be expected to publish digestible “learnings”, and so you will end up skewing your work towards ideas that are likely to produce compelling presentations.

There’s no good place to experiment, in either the corporate or academic world. Your best bet is to move between many domains, trying small ideas in context while also delivering value, and only ever doing your real Hail Mary experiments at home on your own dime.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#75

Post by Pulcinella »

ibdknox wrote: post #63
anateus wrote: post #62

Feels like the proper place for this sort of project is HARC. Given they're both YC, I expect that option was explored.

HARC no longer exists unfortunately.

I thought it was still on going? It’s still listed on YCR.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#76

Post by scroot »

rntz wrote: post #60
scroot wrote: post #59

None of us really know what programming is, and we don't have institutions at present that will allow people to explore the problem thoroughly. These guys deserved a better culture to work in.

> we don't have institutions at present that will allow people to explore the problem thoroughly What about academia? Academia is not a great environment for creating tools that people will actually use, which Eve was definitely trying to be; but "exploring a problem thoroughly" is exactly what academia is for.

I agree in principle, but the academy is not what it was in the 50s, 60s, and 70s when most computing breakthroughs took place. The whole funding model has changed. Short term thinking is the way of the world now.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#77

Post by erikpukinskis »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #15
steelmanning wrote: post #14

This is the same man, Chris Granger, that did a Kickstarter for Light Table, a so-called "next generation IDE," with promotional materials touting as new and revolutionary features that had been standard in IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and even Eclipse for years: http://chrononsystems.com/blog/light-table-concept-vs-realit... Light Table was also ultimately abandoned before completion. Perhaps Granger should rein in his…

You are being a bit harsh. These were ambitious undertakings with high levels of risk going into them, which, I bet, were well known. I've struggled in this field for 10+ years now and there are lots of dark alley ways that end in walls. Then everyone constantly tells you this has already been done when, no, it really hasn't (at best, the technology is there but so piss poor designed that it isn't useful). If you rei…

As a side note, and as someone else working in this space, you do yourself a disservice by telling yourself work in this space is stagnant since SmallTalk.

It’s not that programming ergonomics are stagnant, it’s that all of the gains have been made by professionals. And the tooling is nearly impossible to leverage for a beginner environment because all of the assumptions of a pro developer are built in to their design.

The innovations are there, Heroku, Git, CSS, Markdown... these are all triumphs of programming ergonomics. They’re just all inevitably coopted by professional “Foundations” and amended to the maximum level a Pro developer can handle. JavaScript is almost useless for beginners now because the tooling is so complex, but full time front end devs can crank out HTTP packets like no ones business.

So you will need to watch those developments and lean on their ideas and some of the low level tooling if you ever hope to build a beginner environment. But you can’t use the tools themselves.

Still, if you start with SmallTalk you will fail. If Chris Granger and Bret Victor started their and failed, you will fail too, because those guys are rockstars.

You need to take the ideas being tested in the Pro tools and use them, without adopting the Pro implementations or even the interfaces. It’s or easy.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#78

Post by Nomentatus »

rntz wrote: post #55
golemotron wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if programming is just hard?

Building bridges is hard. But it's a lot easier now than it was five hundred years ago. There's no general reason to think hard things can't get easier.

I might argue that building a bridge is harder now taking the whole process into account (just the metallurgy is vastly more complex); but they don't fall down as often. Which they often did in early railroad days thanks to hidden cracks in the metal that were both frequent and undetectable back then. But ordering a bridge to be built might be easier, now.

Specifying routines completely disambiguously will always be hard, but I do think techniques will come along to provide the equivalent of railings and safety nets while you do this; such as AI to query you about what you really want to happen, and to draw your attention to edge cases and unusual combinations of circumstances that you need to make a clear decision about.

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#79

Post by drcode »

ModernMech wrote: post #34

For anyone interested, here was Eve in its last incarnation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zenELksXotI

I really want to like this, but it's really not much more impressive than this, once you take into account the fact that the author clearly memorized the exact demo steps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIZO1TKPlzY

Re: The Eve programming language project is winding down

#80

Post by flukus »

jonathanedwards wrote: post #32

We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible. Chris saw the problem clearly and tried to fix it. Respect. I am most impressed with the number of iterations he was able to crank in the context of a startup. But ultimately a startup may not be the best place to start, because low-end programming is not a short-term growth play. We have to play the long game.

> We need to have a conversation about the possible paths to make programming more widely accessible.

We've been doing this for as long as computers have existed and have made virtually no progress (pun intended) since 3GL languages. No other industry has ever tried as hard as ours has to make itself redundant. Programming is about as simple now as it will be for the foreseeable future, any simplification sacrifices the versatility.

If you want to make programming more accessible then you need to work on peoples abstract reasoning skills.

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